PowerPC builds

[jaimergp]

It would be nice to add support for ppc64le architectures. I don't know if the current system would work OK for this situation, since it assumes one CUDA version = one Docker image.

Even if that gets solved, there are some external barriers:

• Nvidia has Docker images, but no CentOS 6; only CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 16/18. I read at some point that conda-forge would eventually migrate to CentOS 7, but I have no idea when that's going to happen.
• Anaconda has cudatoolkit for ppc64le, but only for v9.0.

I'll leave this here for future reference and update as needed. Thanks!

[jakirkham]

Yep, I think you have more-or-less outlined the issues that have been in our heads. Thanks for doing that. 🙂

We've requested CentOS 6 ppc64le images in this upstream issue. This may happen as part of making multiarch Docker images tracked in this upstream issue.

That said, our ppc64le stack uses CentOS 7 anyways. This due to the fact that there are only CentOS 7 ppc64le base images. So using CentOS 7 for ppc64le GPU builds would be fine and is already compatible with how we build things on that architecture.

We did start working on CentOS 7-based NVIDIA-derived ppc64le images in PR ( conda-forge/docker-images#113 ). However this ran into issues due to the lack of more recent cudatoolkit versions (as you have noted). Currently defaults does not plan to update cudatoolkit for ppc64le. So things have stopped there. It would be good to unblock this somehow though.

[isuruf]

Why can't we distribute the cudatoolkit? Debian ships the libraries and the compiler. (Maybe with NVIDIA permission?)

[kkraus14]

We're investigating this internally to see if there's any licensing / legal issues and will report back.

[jaimergp]

Thanks for the detailed update, @jakirkham! I'll keep an eye on this.

[jayfurmanek]

There was no ppc64le version of CENTOS6. It predates ppc64le being an official Linux arch so we'd have to start with CENTOS7 for ppc64le.

I agree, it would be great if forge could distribute the cuda toolkit!

[leofang]

We're investigating this internally to see if there's any licensing / legal issues and will report back.

@kkraus14 Any update for this inquiry? Thanks!